Step 5: The body

Step 6: Finished!

A couple of finishing touches.. nails on the gloves and shoes... even more hot glue and black paint. and we are done! Now I need to get started on t...

For the past few years I have been making a couple of homemade costumes for my boys each Halloween. Last year I made a Masterchief following some of the advice from this site and it turned out pretty good. This year my youngest boys told me they want to go as Alien VS Predator. Well I knew that this was going to take a bit of time so I started in September. I decided to start with the Alien, arguably the more difficult costume, not finding too much advice for making a homemade Alien costume I had to get more creative. Did I mention that I am leaving one job and starting another so I only had a budget of about $25.00?

Step 1: Building the Head

The Alien head seemed like the most difficult part to me... How to get that elongated tubular shape? And how to get it to stay on the kids head? Well, I started looking around the garage. Digging through the clutter I came up with an old bicycle helmet. being made of Styrofoam it was pretty easy to shape. I started by cutting the sides down to the bare minimum so my Alien didn't have too bulbous of a head. Now we needed some tubes. The local dollar store came in very handy, I found several 3 quart plastic containers and a plastic pitcher that seemed very promising. Total cost? $3.00 doing good. I cut the containers up and hot glued them onto the helmet. By the way... I went through two bags of hot glue which are about 4 bucks apiece. Then I cut the bottom off of the pitcher, cut that in half and I had my Alien Jaws. A little marker to draw out the teeth, sharp scissors and boom.. we had Alien teeth. I used scrap pieces of the pitcher to make the rest of the Jaws. The head needed a little rounding, fortunately I had several empty 2 liter bottles. By the way, careful with hot glue around two liter bottles, they wrinkle and shrink if the glue is too hot.

I am sooo happy to find this! My boys are wanting to be alien vs predator this year & this gives me hope! This will be my first attempt at making a costume from scratch, I can only hope it turns out as good as this!

Thanks for this guide! I've convinced my 6 year old sister to be net-head. I'm even making her a fake facehugger. If anyone's interested i could make an instructable for that, but its not as cool as your stuff really amazing.

you are amazing :3 i have been looking for an easier way to build a xenomorph (alien) costume for a lonnnggg longggg time and now i have the answere XD thank you so much for making this guide! time to get started on my costume :P

not too bad actually. I cut the eye holes in the vinyl right under the head, so he looks through the aliens neck. His vision upwards is blocked but he can see his feet quite well and about 6 feet in front of him. to see farther he has to tip his head back. Thanks!

Now that's a Halloween costume. Halloween is a time for scaring the be-Jesus out of the little kids. It's the only time of the year when it is permitted. I say that there should be a law, why not since there are laws against every thing else, that on Halloween there can be no cute little ghosts, cartoon characters, angels, or any such costumes.